Category: fyi
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talk: Changing the Landscape of Voting and Voter Registration
Noon 3/28: Dr. Juan Gilbert of Clemson will talk about Changing the Landscape of Voting and Voter Registration through Universal Design at Noon in the UMBC Information Systems Department in room ITE459 on Wednesday, March 28.
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Stripe capture the flag wargame
Stripe, a San Francisco startup with an online-payment system, is hosting a simple online cybersecurity capture the flag (CTF) challenge. See their blog post for the details. “The hardest part of writing secure code is learning to think like an attacker. For example, every programmer is told to watch out for SQL injections, but it’s…
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Build a better ant in the Google AI Challenge
Google is sponsoring another AI Challenge Competition run by an independent group of volunteers that grew out of the Computer Science Club of the University of Waterloo. The competition opens today and invites submissions of programs designed to control ants a simulated colony in competition with other colonies. Ants is a multi-player strategy game…
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DiCaprio to play Alan Turing in a new biopic 'The Imitation Game'
Warner Brothers is said to have purchased the rights to a script The Imitation Game by screenwriter Graham Moore about British mathematician Alan Turing who made many important contributions to computer science. Leonardo DiCaprio is supposedly interested in playing Turing and is "chasing the project" and Ron Howard is rumored to be interested in in…
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Google introduces the Dart web programming language
Google unveiled its new web programming language Dart today. It's described as a "class-based optionally typed programming language for building web applications". Dart has a native virtual machine and can also be compiled into JavaScript, allowing it to run on current browser. Google says it it exploring adding the Dart virtual machine to the…
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Bayes' theorem found guilty by a UK judge?
Ruling limits use of statistical reasoning in legal arguments A UK judge in murder trial ruled that Bayes' Theorem and similar statistical analyses can no longer be used to argue for the soundness of evidence in such trials. The Guardian has the story, A formula for justice. "It's not often that the quiet world of…
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Do you know the right programming languages?
Do you know the right programming languages? Depending on your objective, the most important one to know might be Java, Python, PhP, C, or even Haskell. IEEE Spectrum has a short article on The Top 10 Programming Languages that is based on data from David Welton's Programming Languages Popularity site which "attempts to collect a…
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Angry birds are attacking the US economy
The Atlantic has a short article on estimating the cost to the US economy of the popular angry birds game available on most smartphones. Their estimate? $1.5 billion dollars a year. "Every March, it is a requirement that every newspaper and website in every town in the United States run a story about how much…
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Google describes challenges in detecting Web-based malware
A new Google technical report, Trends in Circumventing Web-Malware Detection documents that it has become difficult to identify malicious Web sites as antivirus software is becoming less effective against them. The researchers analyzed four years' worth of data from 160 million Web pages using its Safe Browsing service, which warns users when they attempt to…
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George Dyson on the birth of the computer
In his 2003 TED talk, George Dyson tells stories from the birth of the modern computer — from its 17th-century origins to the hilarious notebooks of some early computer engineers.